In May 2018, Amazon threatened the Seattle City Council over an employee head tax proposal that would have funded houselessness services and low-income housing. The tax would have cost Amazon about $800 per employee, or 0.7% of their average salary.[202] In retaliation, Amazon paused construction on a new building, threatened to limit further investment in the city, and funded a repeal campaign. Although originally passed, the measure was soon repealed after an expensive repeal campaign spearheaded by Amazon.[203]

Summer break may be over, but you can still sign up for Amazon Prime Student! When you start an Amazon Prime subscription for Students, you'll get a 6-month free trial and then 50% off your Amazon Prime membership (just $6.49/mo!). There are a lot of other perks of having Prime Student, too: watch Amazon Prime streaming exclusives like "Alpha House," and other TV & movies, get free 2-day shipping on textbooks, and more. Plus, get exclusive coupons for Prime members only.

While Amazon has publicly opposed secret government surveillance, as revealed by Freedom of Information Act requests it has supplied facial recognition support to law enforcement in the form of the "Rekognition" technology and consulting services. Initial testing included the city of Orlando, Florida, and Washington County, Oregon. Amazon offered to connect Washington County with other Amazon government customers interested in Rekognition and a body camera manufacturer. These ventures are opposed by a coalition of civil rights groups with concern that they could lead to expansion of surveillance and be prone to abuse. Specifically, it could automate the identification and tracking of anyone, particularly in the context of potential police body camera integration.[204][205][206] Due to the backlash, the city of Orlando has publicly stated it will no longer use the technology.[207]
Currently, individuals can sell goods in some 20 categories, while professional sellers have been approved to sell items in more than 15 additional categories. Individual-approved categories include books, consumer electronics, tools and home improvement, and toys and games. On the other hand, professionals must meet various requirements to sell beauty products, clothing, fine art and wine.
If you’ve already created an Amazon account on amazon.com, the easiest way to buy something is to type product keywords into the search bar at the top of the screen and press enter. Click on the product you want and press “Add to cart.” Click on the cart icon in the top right corner and click “Proceed to checkout.” Fill out your shipping and payment information and then click “Place your order.”
Though more people shopped in-store and online on Black Friday 2017, Cyber Monday continues to beat Black Friday’s online sales. Last year, 81 million consumers shopped on Cyber Monday, bringing in $6.59 billion for retailers. 2017 marked a year-over-year increase of nearly 17 percent and set an all-time record of the most ever spent on the digital holiday.
Like on Black Friday, for online Cyber Monday shoppers, there’s no need to wake before the rooster crows. Honey’s Parsi says that for their users, spending peaked at 4 p.m. PST in Los Angeles and 11 p.m. EST in New York City last year. “On Cyber Monday, there is less pressure to get an early start because retailers are often better stocked online, where they store items in large warehouses—not on shop shelves with limited space—and can ship items from different locations to make up for shortfalls,” Palmer agrees. “Plus, many Cyber Monday sales actually start on Sunday.”
In 2014, Amazon expanded its lobbying practices as it prepared to lobby the Federal Aviation Administration to approve its drone delivery program, hiring the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld lobbying firm in June.[210] Amazon and its lobbyists have visited with Federal Aviation Administration officials and aviation committees in Washington, D.C. to explain its plans to deliver packages.[211]

The company has also invested in a number of growing firms, both in the United States and Internationally.[67][68] In 2014, Amazon purchased top level domain .buy in auction for over $4 million.[69][70] The company has invested in brands that offer a wide range of services and products, including Engine Yard, a Ruby-on-Rails platform as a service company,[71] and Living Social, a local deal site.[72]

Amazon employs a multi-level e-commerce strategy. Amazon started by focusing on business-to-consumer relationships between itself and its customers and business-to-business relationships between itself and its suppliers and then moved to facilitate customer-to-customer with the Amazon marketplace which acts as an intermediary to facilitate transactions. The company lets anyone sell nearly anything using its platform. In addition to an affiliate program that lets anyone post-Amazon links and earn a commission on click-through sales, there is now a program which lets those affiliates build entire websites based on Amazon's platform.[147]
The first Echo came out in late 2014 as a Prime member exclusive, but in the four short years since, Amazon has developed dozens of different smart home products that revolve around the speaker and voice assistant format. Today, thousands of products integrate with the company’s Alexa platform to make use of its voice search and query capabilities. Just as it once foresaw e-commerce, streaming, and cloud computing as the future of the internet, Amazon saw AI as not just something that could live within the smartphone — as Apple established with Siri and Google with its Assistant — but also in the home.
A 2015 front-page article in The New York Times profiled several former Amazon employees[192] who together described a "bruising" workplace culture in which workers with illness or other personal crises were pushed out or unfairly evaluated.[11] Bezos responded by writing a Sunday memo to employees,[193] in which he disputed the Times's account of "shockingly callous management practices" that he said would never be tolerated at the company.[11]
Amazon, with its unfettered access to troves of valuable consumer and seller data, came upon a rather interesting business model around 2009, when it launched a private label division under the name AmazonBasics. It started first with the items the company noticed people most often purchased without thinking too hard about the brand name, like batteries and HDMI cables. But as The New York Times reported this past summer, this proved to be a way to fast track a fledgling product category into a massive money-making top seller — AmazonBasics’ AA batteries now outsell Duracell and Energizer on Amazon.com after just a few years.

If your new dress doesn't fit right or a gadget arrives broken, Amazon accepts returns on most sales within 30 days of delivery. In general, third-party sellers offer the same policy, although you'll usually have to pay for return shipping to the seller unless the seller advertises free returns, whereas Amazon often provides a prepaid shipping label for its own returns. The cost of the return may be subtracted from the refund if the item was returned for some other reason than Amazon's mistake.

Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary; he settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different", just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world.[25] Additionally, a name that began with "A" was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of an alphabetized list.[25] Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it's still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world."[26]
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